Call it Lotusphere, call it IBM Connected or call it any other name that IBM has changed it to after dropping the name all old timers refer to the conference as: Lotusphere. No matter what you call it, the official name this year is Connect 2016.

Another change is that this year it’s not taking place at the Disney hotels Swan and Dolphin, but at Hilton Orlando. You can see it on the photo that I took by the lake at the place we live. Since the conference hotel itself had insanely high room prices, my colleague, Gunnar, our Domino consultant Gunleif and me hired a great flat at the Vista Cay Resort, a short walk from the hotel.

The Vista Cay Resort is a relatively cheap and great place to stay, with stores, restaurants, a gym and a swimming pool in the neighbourhood. I whole heartily recommend a place like this for a family holiday trip to Orlando.

This year I’m the official blogger for the Norwegian IBM User Group (ISBG). That’s because I won a scholarship to go to the conference, which means that ISBG is paying for everything. In return I will blog from the conference on their behalf, I will look for potential candidates to speak at the ISBG spring meeting in May and I will give a presentation from the conference at said meeting.

We arrived this afternoon after a pretty uneventful flight. The storm/hurricane that hit Molde Friday evening resulted in my flight from Molde to Oslo being delayed for an hour and a half, but other than that the trip went just swimmingly. Ok, I have to admit that I would like to ask all parents to never ever go on ten hour flights with children under the age of 6. It’s torture both for the kids and their fellow passengers.

The weather is great, 22 degrees (72 F) and we just finished a pizza and a few beers. The first part of the conference starts tomorrow afternoon, and I’m eager to start. I hope you are eager to follow me as well.

We in the IBM community are much too focused on the negative things. We are our own worst enemies in that regard. And when I look back at my blog postings from the previous Lotusphere/Connected conferences, I see that I’m just as guilty in this as everybody else. So I will promise you this: I will focus on the positive things. My job is to learn all I can to make it easier for my company to solve our business challenges and improve our flow of information and IT structure. I don’t care if this means that I have to use this or that tool/standard/language. The important thing is to get the job done, and done well. So no complaints from me this year. It will only be about what can be achieved, and not what I would wish could be achieved.

Feel free to leave a comment if you want to get in touch, follow up on something I wrote or give me tips on what I should look at while I’m here.

Adding a file to an activity can a lot of times be very useful. However, if you just simply upload the file into an element in the activity, you have no way to upload a new version of that file. This means that you have to download the file locally, edit it, and then upload it again into the activity. You then have to delete the previous version of the file from the activity, because there will now be two files.

There is, of course, a much better way to do this. You can share your own files with the activity. This means that every time you update that file, the activity will link to the newest version of the file, and you don’t have to worry about old versions.

Create a new Entry or To do item, or start editing an existing one

If all the fields are not showing, click on More Options:

Click on the twisty to expand

All the fields are now showing. Find Add File:

Click on this

Click on the drop down arrow and choose Link to File:

Choose Link to file

You will now see a window where your files are listed:

Choose among your own files

You can navigate to see more files by using the Next and Previous links on top. You choose the files you want to share by checking the check box to the left of the file name:

Click in the check box for the files you want to link to

When you have selected the files you want, click on Insert Links.

The files are now added to the activity element:

The chosen file links are listed in the form

You can remove any file by clicking on the x to the right of the file name. When you are finished with your editing click on Save.

The files are now added to this activity element:

The files chosen are now linked

All members of the activity can now click on a file link to open a file. Remember: This is just a link to one of your files. The members of the activity can’t edit the file and then upload it to the activity as a new version. Only you, and people you have shared the file with and given editor rights to, can upload new versions . But when a new version is uploaded, the link in the activity will lead directly to that version. You do not need to add the link again.
This is a much better way to deal with files in Activities.

Please let me know in the comments section what you think of this tip, or if you have any suggestions, corrections or other feedback.

I’m starting a new series. I will present tips on how you can make it easier for your users to adapt to using IBM Connections. I’ve gone through all the pitfalls you can think of while introducing IBM Connections in our organisation. After four years of using the product, teaching and training people on how to use it, doing presentations of IBM Connections and documenting and creating wikis about it, I feel that I can share some of the stuff that I’ve had success with. Please let me know what you think.

Some people think it’s very hard to follow all the stuff going on in IBM Connections. Nothing could be further from the truth. With one search and a couple of clicks, you usually find what you are looking for pretty easily.

Search Field

When you are in your news stream (usually the front page in most IBM Connections installations) you will find the search field in the upper right corner:

Click on picture for larger version

You start searching by simply typing in the search field:

Searching has type-ahead

To perform the search you hit the ENTER key on your keyboard.

Notice that the search field will automatically suggest persons who are tagged with the expression you are searching for. This happens no matter what you are searching for. To select a person you just click on her.

Choose what you want to search for

In the pull down field to the left of the search field you can predetermine what kind of content you want to search for:

Choose what you want to search for

Click on what you want to search for. Then type the search word or search expression in the search field and hit ENTER. The search will now be performed. Above the search result you will see pull down menus that makes it possible to sort and minimize the search result.

Search result

Here I’ve searched for the expression domino:

The search result for “domino.” Click on picture to see it in full size

You can now sort the the search result by date or relevance:

You can sort the search

Above the search result you can also choose whether you want to show all the contents in IBM Connections that you have access to, or if you just want to show contents that belong to you:

Filter your search

Reduce the search result

As you can see, the search yielded 210 hits. That’s a bit too much to wade through. Fortunately you have the possibility to reduce the search results by just a few clicks with the mouse button.

Choose application

After performing a search you will see a menu to the left of the search result:

Choose the application you want to search in

The currently active menu item is the one marked with blue. In the illustration above we have chosen All Content.

If you want to search only in Files you click on that menu item:

Search result for Files

It will now only display files that either contains or were tagged with my search expression. If I had chosen Wikis in the menu it would have showed a search result with all wiki pages that either contained or were tagged with the search expression.

Tags

It’s very important to train your users in how to use tags, and make them understand how important it is to tag all contents in Connections. This is a perfect example of a situation where tags are very helpful.

As shown above we got 210 hits when we searched for domino. Let’s say I was looking for a file about upgrading a Domino server. I will therefore use the tag upgrade to minimize the search result.

In this example, the tag upgrade is displayed among the top hits:

The tag “upgrade” is a link I can click on

I can now click on the tag.

If I didn’t immediately spot the upgrade tag in the search result, I could have clicked on the pull down menu item Tags in the left hand menu:

Tag cloud

After clicking on upgrade it would now show a search result showing only contents that contain both the word dominoand the tag upgrade:

With one click we now have only 4 hits!

So with just one click on the mouse button, we went from 210 hits to 4 hits!

Please let me know in the comments section what you think of this tip. And let me know if you have questions regarding IBM Connections